Community colleges accrediting group hears from critics

Barbara Beno, president of the the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), talks with the Editorial Board of The San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, May 15, 2014.

Barbara Beno, president of the the Accrediting Commission for...

SACRAMENTO — The accrediting commission that has threatened to shut down City College of San Francisco has an image problem, is too secretive, and has alienated colleges “to the point of hostility.”

That assessment comes not from a critic, but from a supporter of the embattled Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges — Barry Russell, president of Las Positas College in Livermore — who on Friday joined more than a dozen instructors, college presidents and a student in Sacramento to tell the commission that it has to change its ways or recognize that its 50-year run overseeing quality in the nation’s largest college system of more than 2 million students is over.

“It’s time to figure out a new way of doing things,” said Russell, a former accrediting commissioner himself who said he was taken aback by the harsh assessment of the commission by a state task force whose new report finds the commission so punitive and impervious to criticism that it should be replaced.

Friday’s meeting was a rare emergency session called by the private, nonprofit commission to discuss what it should do about the new report, which could lead to its ouster by the college system’s Board of Governors next month. (Replacing the commission could take years, however.) The commissioners — who usually meet only twice a year and rarely hear public testimony — listened to 90 minutes of comments before heading into a private session to come up with a game plan to try to save themselves.

There was irony in the testimony as faculty and students of City College told the commissioners that it was too late for them to change their ways and fix problems that have languished for years despite having been urged to do so in earlier reports. It was exactly what the commission told City College in 2012 when it gave the school less than a year to fix its extensive problems, then voted in 2013 to revoke the college’s accreditation. (The college remains accredited and has been given one more year to come into compliance.)

Yet the problem “isn’t just about City College of San Francisco,” said Linda Sneed, a vice president with the California Federation of Teachers, who said the commission has created a “climate of fear.” She said colleges “are afraid of this commission. It’s not seen as an agent of improvement.”

The commission is made up of 19 community college administrators, former faculty members and other education experts. Several appeared humbled by the verbal onslaught.

“We do need to sit down and do more self-reflection,” said Commissioner Raul Rodriguez, chancellor of Rancho Santiago Community College District in Santa Ana. “We have to find a way out of this.”

Commissioner Richard Mahon said he had no problem with the commission’s decisions, only its attitude. “I feel that we’re seen as arrogant and difficult,” he said, and admitted: “I don’t actually know how to fix the image and the trust.”

Mahon also noted that at a meeting of a different commission, which accredits California’s four-year universities, he noticed an attitude of respect for faculty and a sense that involving them in the accreditation process helps colleges improve.

“That’s not something I see in (the commission’s) culture at the moment,” he said.

Despite the commission’s tone of conciliation, there is evidence of resistance.

Its president, Barbara Beno, declined California Community College Chancellor Brice Harris’ request that she schedule the special meeting two weeks later to give him time to gather colleges’ responses to the task force report and recommendations, which he had hoped to tell the commission about. Harris did not appear at the meeting.

Beno and other commission staff members also compiled a 27-page response to the task force report that appeared to be a point-by-point rebuttal to each criticism.

Beno said it was not. “It just lays out the facts,” she said after the public comment period ended. “It puts more information into the mix.”

Tim Killikelly, president of the faculty union at City College, said that despite the commission’s tone of humility and pledge to improve, commissioners appeared to miss the point that the task force recommended shutting them down.

“They didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of what the task force said,” Killikelly said, sounding as dismissive of the commissioners as they had been about City College faculty protesters in 2013 who resisted the call to revoke the school’s accreditation.

“They’re dancing around that huge fact,” Killikelly said of the commissioners. “They’re in a state of denial.”